No wonder the locations of the ITV long-running (1997, first series) Midsomer Murders looks so familiar. They are in England's Somerset County. The houses and out buildings, even much of the landscape, this series could be shot on the Eastern Shore, MD, and the viewers wouldn't know otherwise, until the characters spoke, of course.
However, Maryland's Somerset County was settled initially mostly by Virginians "to escape religious persecution," i.e. Catholics.
Our county Kent was named for England's County Kent, which is east of England's Somerset County, both in the South of England, from whence did come most of the Chesapeake's 16th and 17th C Company and colonial bigwhigs who owned and ruled the region for so long, i.e. the Cavaliers as they became in their mythology. The demographic tables and charts of Albion's Seed for this Folkway provide this information, as well as that this is the region of England that was established already by the Romans as vast agricultural latifundias worked with slave labor. This practice of agriculture via slaves never really quite went away there, not even by the era of migration to the New World Viriginia Company colony. What it had done was transform in certain ways, particularly via the structures of feudalism.
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